by Nathaniel Flakin

“We are practically a new party,” declared Ines Schwedtner, cochair of Die Linke, last week. Tens of thousands of young people joined Germany’s Left Party during the election campaign, putting them over 100,000 members for the first time since the party’s founding in 2007.

Unusually for a left-wing party, Die Linke has always consisted mostly of retirees: just a few years ago, over two-thirds of its members were above the legal retirement age. This has to do with its roots in the Socialist Unity Party (SED), the ruling party of East Germany, which transformed itself into the PDS and then Die Linke. This largely passive, older membership formed the social base of “left-wing” ministers in different state governments.

Today, however, young people are more than a tiny minority inside Die Linke. “It would seem we’ve solved the party’s problem of being overaged,” celebrated Mario Candeias. And in the election campaign, thousands of young people were indeed knocking on doors.

This was part of what led to the surprise comeback, bringing Die Linke up to 8.8 percent. But the main factor was the shift to the right by Friedrich Merz of the conservative CDU, who voted together with the far-right AfD to pass a resolution against immigration. Die Linke benefited from millions of people going onto the streets to stop the Right. This was also aided by the departure of Sahra Wagenknecht and her BSW last year — the “anti-woke,” “left conservative” politician actually voted together with Merz and the AfD against immigration. Die Linke was thus seen as a bastion against the racist frenzy.

Contradictions

Since the election, Die Linke’s leaders have been euphoric, but they can’t hide all their contradictions. The 64 newly elected members of the Bundestag got together and chanted “alerta antifascista!” Right-wing media were up in arms about such “antifa” behavior — more disturbed by anti-fascists than actual fascists in parliament.

Tens of thousands of people joined Die Linke to stop Merz, yet the day after the election, Bodo Ramelow — the former prime minister of Thuringia, and one of the party’s six directly elected candidates — declared he would be happy to work with the new chancellor on the basis of “common ground with other democratic parties.” Ramelow supports German imperialism’s policies in Palestine and Ukraine: he has displayed Israeli flags and called for Ukrainian refugees to be deported so that they can fight on the front. As a “left-wing” prime minister, Ramelow deported thousands of people.

Die Linke face a concrete test of their position toward the German state soon. In 2011, a “debt brake” was put into the constitution, with the conservatives and social democrats working together to require “balanced budgets” and permanent austerity. Now, Merz intends to “reform” the debt brake and allow new borrowing — but only in order to finance German rearmament. The CDU would need the support of Die Linke to get the necessary two-thirds majority. Die Linke has said they are “open” to this reform as long as the new money doesn’t go “exclusively” to military spending. In other words, there are already signs that the Left Party will agree to some new military spending.

Recently, Gregor Gysi (Die Linke’s most popular politician) wrote that we need to “fight seriously for our freedom, our democracy, our rule of law,” on the basis of agreements “from the [conservative Bavarian] CSU to the Left.” This is a barely concealed ideological preparation for voting in favor of “national defense.” Gysi has never been an anti-militarist. Even 15 years ago, he was reassuring the U.S. ambassador that Die Linke’s formal opposition to NATO was not worth the paper it is written on.

Candeia, while hyping Die Linke’s perspectives, has added that “certain topics and inner-party contradictions such as in foreign policy and peace need to be clarified.” In other words, the party does not fundamentally oppose German imperialism. This is a long way from the socialist tradition in Germany: not one person and not one penny for militarism! Watering down this strict anti-militarist position is what led to the collapse of socialism in 1914.

A Parliamentary Party

This is not the first time there have been good vibes in Die Linke. Fifteen years ago, back in 2009, there was a similar enthusiasm after a result of 11.9 percent. Tens of thousands of young people joined the party back then — and most of them were quickly disappointed, while a few got cushy bureaucratic jobs in exchange for sacrificing their principles.

Die Linke, despite a surge of activism before the election, remains a bureaucratic, parliamentary party committed to working within the bourgeois regime in hopes of changing it. You can see this even in their most “rebellious” campaign ads. In one, we see a working-class family getting evicted from their home. Gysi shows up and says, “No, not with us. Back inside!” He winks. The family moves back inside.

Now, it would have been easy to film a real protest against an eviction with Gysi in the middle. But Gysi never goes to such protests. Die Linke is a party that aims to administer the police, not confront them. Gysi himself has been a minister in Berlin. Ironically, Die Linke was responsible for privatizing up to 200,000 housing units in Berlin — they evicted tens of thousands of people from their homes. Reformists like Gysi promise to fight for you in parliament — and once they get into a minister’s chair, they evict you.

Back in 2007, several revolutionary socialist groups joined Die Linke hoping to reach and organize the thousands of young people joining the party. All of them came out significantly weaker for the experience — and more than a few socialists were corrupted by the bureaucracy.

International Experiences

Nonetheless, people will wonder if this “practically new party” can really change. Won’t Ramelow, Gysi, and other government socialists get outvoted at the next congress? Beyond the history of Die Linke itself, we can look at some international examples.

Ten years ago, two European left parties, Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain, were flooded with tens of thousands of new members. They achieved astounding electoral breakthroughs: Podemos reached 20 percent, and Syriza, 36 percent. These results led both parties into bourgeois governments: Podemos as a junior partner of the social democratic PSOE, and Syriza leading a coalition with the far-right ANEL. Both parties, which were founded to oppose austerity, ended up implementing it.

There are also examples of older reformist parties getting overrun with new members. When Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party in the UK, hundreds of thousands of young people joined. Yet, faced with a campaign of slanders by the right-wing press, Corbyn sought to reassure the bourgeoisie: instead of fighting back against false charges of antisemitism, he expelled some of his own supporters. Now, Labour is farther to the right than ever, and a generation of Corbynistas were demoralized.

In the United States, the surprise success of Bernie Sanders’s campaign in the Democratic Party primary in 2016 led to rapid growth of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). For decades, the DSA had been a social-democratic lobby group inside a bourgeois party, with a few thousand mostly older members. Suddenly, tens of thousands of young socialists showed up with all kinds of radical ideas, and the old guard was reduced to a tiny minority. As the DSA debated breaking with the Democrats and forming a new party, everything seemed possible. Yet, bit by bit, these radical oppositions were broken down, and the DSA’s old strategy reimposed itself. Now the much larger DSA is once again committed to supporting the Democratic Party.

These projects — Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn’s Momentum, and the DSA — failed not for a lack of young activists. The problem was that the parties remained committed to a strategy of reforming capitalism. They had great ideas for reforms, but implementing them meant confronting the capitalist class and their state. In a time of growing global crisis, the capitalists were unwilling to offer even crumbs. So these reformist parties sacrificed their stated principles, and their supporters’ enthusiasm, to the goal of running the state. This is what has also happened with Die Linke in the past — and will happen again.

Tigers Don’t Change Their Stripes

The revival of Die Linke has clear limits. The party has already proved its willingness to administer the German state, and it has no fundamental objections to the central policies of German imperialism. Heidi Reichinnek likes to be portrayed as a firebrand, but she pointedly refuses to say anything about German support for genocide in Gaza. In the Bundestag, she has declared that “Israel of course has the right to defend itself.” Even Pascal Meiser, directly elected from Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, where many thousands of Palestinians live, has been careful not to say a word about the war.

While some younger faces of the party like Ferat Koçak are pro-Palestinian, all of the most prominent leaders are fanatical supporters of genocide. Petra Pau and Dietmar Bartsch, both in leading roles in the Bundestag, not only support Israel but have gone so far as to attack anti-Zionist Jews.

Die Linke wants to focus on bread-and-butter issues — but the new government is going to push through austerity in order to finance rearmament. The working class in Germany cannot get more money for public housing unless we loudly oppose militarism.

The Left Party’s internal life will certainly become more interesting in the coming period. There might even be less space for astoundingly chauvinist positions from Ramelow, Gysi, and other right-wing leaders. Time will tell if Die Linke become a bit more like a “normal” European reformist party, and tones down its support for Israel in the name of German Staatsräson.

But even with such shifts, the party’s fundamentally reformist character will not change. Die Linke’s politicians will join governments every time they get a chance. They are currently in two state governments, in Bremen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and they are supporting two other right-wing minority governments in Saxony and Thuringia. In other words, they are carrying out deportations and evictions right now.

There will be conflicts between all these tens of thousands of new members and the established party leadership. As revolutionary socialists, we will not support a reformist party — but we will work side by side with party members in campaigns against austerity and racism. We will call on the members of the Bundestag to stick to the promises they made in the campaign — and we will criticize them when they inevitably break these promises. We will campaign for the party to break with capitalist governments and to oppose every deportation.

The Merz government will carry out brutal attacks on our class, both in Germany and internationally. We need a massive fightback, but Die Linke’s parliamentarians are, in the words of Ramelow, “ready to compromise.” As all the new members of Die Linke gain experience with their new party, the process of polarization will continue. Lots of them will continue to radicalize, and as Marxists, we will encourage that process.